George Lucas defends Greedo shooting Han first

Deep inside a compelling Washington Post profile of George Lucas is the Star Wars creator defending perhaps his most infamous bit of Special Edition tinkering: having Greedo shoot Han Solo first rather than the scruffy-looking smuggler taking a pre-emptive action.

Lucas says Han shooting first in the Mos Eisley cantina — which is what happened in the original edit of 1977’s debut Star Wars film — ran against the character’s principles. “Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?'” Lucas asks. “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”

In a recent interview with EW, Harrison Ford refused to take a side on the Who Shot First debate. “Knock yourself out,” he said. “Have fun with it.” But The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams had a firm opinion on the subject when asked during a Sirius XM Town Hall on Monday if Han shot first. “Hell yes,” Abrams said (the episode, hosted by PEOPLE and EW editorial director Jess Cagle, will premiere Dec. 14 at 6 p.m. ET on EW Radio Sirius XM 105).

Fans have long maintained that Lucas was just flat-out wrong on this one. The shooting established Ford’s character as somebody not to be messed with, and in the scene it’s pretty clear that Greedo is going to kill Han regardless (“Over my dead body” / “That’s the idea”). So Han waiting for Greedo to take a shot at him while at point blank range doesn’t make any sense.

But Lucas won’t read that, or your comment below, because he also admitted in the interview that he has “assiduously avoided the Internet since 2000 — no Facebook, no Twitter, no e-mail even.” The first of the oft-derided Star Wars prequel movies, The Phantom Menace, was released in 1999, so that was probably indeed a good time to bail out.

Read that whole WashPost story here, and see both versions of the Han versus Greedo scene below: